The failure to tax the right thing results in an accumulation of wealth in the hands of those already wealthiest and this results in increased centralization of ownership of everything including the means of indoctrinating the populous.
If this was actually true, you might have a point.
The problem with your theory is that over 80% of millionaires in this country are first-generation wealthy, and more often than not, their children do not inherit their ability to generate wealth along with whatever wealth they inherit. We live in a society that is unprecedented in the social mobility it affords its members. At no time in history has there been better financial and social mobility than we have now.
There is every reason to charge a use fee for property rights that would not exist in the absence of government
Actually, the constitution enumerates only limited powers to the government; it derives its authority from the consent of the governed, not the other way around. The basis of rights is not that they are caused by government, but that they are inherent in the people themselves. Perhaps you intended to suggest that it's reasonable to charge a use fee for services that wouldn't happen without government, but it came out backwards.
The concentration of wealth is not a problem that harms anybody, it's a non-problem that already solves itself- new wealth is constantly eclipsing the old, and sustained intergenerational wealth transfer is exceedingly rare.
Moreover, trying to 'solve' it politically is expensive and actually harmful. Whenever someone decides that it would be a great idea to use the government to take wealth away from its owners and give it to everyone else, the wealthy will quite reasonably beat them at that game like a pinata- they didn't become wealthy by losing games that involve money, after all. The resulting class warfare is expensive, divisive, and no fun. We have a tax system, for example, that is overly expensive (would you believe it costs us an estimated third of the revenue it generates, just to comply with it?) and unfair for everybody, just because we tried targeting the rich and they're better at buying congressmen (who write tax code) than the rest of us.
This is the danger we face when we try to expand the power of the government to accomplish our social missions: we become subject ourselves to this expanded power. Bringing the government into this game is like bringing a bat to a fight you're having with a better fighter than you: he'll just take the bat away from you and beat you senseless with it, at which point you'll either learn that class warfare is stupid and harmful to wage (because the rich will always win) or you'll go look for another bat to get beaten with.
Going after assets would just cause capital flight and further ensure that any taxing authority that tried it would quickly sink to bankruptcy.
Aren't heterosexual marriage documents still handed out by churches?
Churches can hand out whatever documents they want regarding religious marriage.
Yes, this is a conversation not about the proper role of churches, but the proper role of the state, and whether or not the state should have the authority to define what marriage is for everybody. What's emerged in the national conversation about 'what marriage is' is that there is not agreement about just what marriage is. Some view marriage as the cornerstone of civilization; the basis of the basic family unit. Some see it as a holy rite. Some see it as a simple, secular contract. Some say it's purpose is to [tame men|foster children|give women security|make us happy|be the basis of moral culture|etc]. Some think it vital to enforce via government mandate their own particular view in the matter. Unfortunately, this will involve essentially shoving their POV down the throats of those who don't share their view.
For this reason, I see it as problematic to have the state be anything but the registrar of civil matrimony. The folks who don't separate holy matrimony (the church rite) from civil matrimony (the legal stuff) seem keen on using the state to enforce the view of their church over that of other churches. In my view, that's the problem with this whole debate- it isn't whether gay people should or shouldn't marry, or that the strange cat lady can't marry all 43 of her cats, it's whether this should be a political question in the first place.
He wants the Governtment "to monitor and alter the content of radio and television programs.". Remember, this is the same govt that will at any given time be led by the political party you are against. Do you want republicans to have this power to alter radio and tv science content? Do you want democrats to have this power to alter radio and tv economic content?
Dear merciful God, no.
Very good insight, and a strong argument against expanding the role, scope, and power of government in this way- because to do so will simply incentivize the abuse of that power without providing a check against it.
The proposal to make the government into the 'fairness police' just moves the power to say what's fair away from the media (which is somewhat distributed) to a more central location- government- where it may be abused by even fewer people. Given that one of the major services the press provides us (in theory, anyways) is to report stuff the current government doesn't particularly want to hear, it strikes me as a VERY bad idea to make the government the arbiter of fair press.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- George Orwell
Actually, pretty much all apps require admin privilege to install. Doesn't matter if it's a game or a spreadsheet or what- if it's executable content, you should get a prompt for privilege if you try to install it. (note that this is not the case for active browser content- flash games, for example, don't need any privilege).
Actually, according to several reviews, you don't even have to type a password. You just click "Ok".
This is only the case if you've actually got the necessary privilege. If your logon account is a member of the Administrators group, you have the privilege already- you're being explicitly asked to approve it and it would be stupid for you to have to supply your creds- after all, you're already logged in as you, you're just running with a limited token (which is a good idea) that you're asked to assert from time to time.
Such is not the case if you're running as a member of the users group- in that case, you must supply creds of an account with said privilege.
I'm rooting for metric, but for one part:...am I the only one who thinks "liters per 100km" is an annoying way of expressing fuel efficiency? Why can't we measure Kilometers per Liter, as we have with Miles per Gallon?/peeve
yaaay metric system! booooo hogsheads per furlong!
I paid for college by working on fishing boats that worked the Bering Sea. Now THAT was dirty work- during cod season, my job was to bleed them out before they died of asphyxiation- this prevents blood from pooling in the meat, makes fillets pretty and white. If you've ever slaughtered anything for a living, you know what it is to be covered in blood spray. Mercifully, fish don't scream.
When we were in the fish, we'd work insane hours- 20 on, 4 off, repeat. After a while, people would lose their will to live, and injury rates would go up. Commercial fishing ranked just behind crabbing and high-rise firefighting for dangerous jobs. I have, it would appear, an exceptionally strong will to live, but a weak stomach- for 12 hours at the beginning of every storm we hit (some of which were plain incredible) I would throw up every 20 minutes. I promise, I didn't do it in your fishsticks.
No bad smell I've ever encountered compares to the smell of those boats on the way back to port- by the end of the trip, the fish that fell to the deck and didn't wash overboard had been covered by the fish that fell after, and the bottom fish were liquefied goo. Fire hoses would start the job, followed by scrub pads, brushes, and chlorine-based sanitizers. There was no way to not smell like rotten fish- and after a while, you couldn't bring yourself to care. I burned my boat clothes after my last contract, which finished paying off my undergrad loans, bought me a car, and took a small chunk out of my grad school loans.
I'm glad to have the experience I have; being at sea all that time was, in hindsight, strangely wonderful- I've always loved the sea. The downsides were that most of your peers were either burn-outs from the service sector, took a contract because they blew their last pile of money up their nose, or were one step ahead of their parole officers- and management treated us all accordingly- like malfunctioning teenagers.
I now work for one of the companies on the top 100 list, don't have to kill anything but runaway processes, don't have to risk life and limb, get to use my brain for a living, but still spend a lot of time looking at the ocean.
If you're a smart user, you won't disable UAC. You'll recognize that there's value in having control over what runs on your computer.
I don't know that their approach really sucks as bad as you say; it recognizes that there's a lot of decisions that should be left up to the user, and the decision-making on whether to approve a privilege elevation isn't that complicated: do I know what that is? no? then no, I won't approve it. If you're installing an app, say 'yes'. If you're surfing porn, say 'no'. If you have questions at all about anything, say 'no'. There, you're an expert.
If you turn off UAC, you're essentially saying 'yes' to everything- at which point, you might really have a good reason to swear. Without UAC, it's more painful to run as a limited user, and running as a limited user gives you many security benefits- like, for example, not giving your mail client or browser or apps the sort of privilege worth exploiting.
I was able to use my laptop last week, running Vista (RTM), just fine via wifi and wired modes on a more recent version of that same wireless router. You may be able to flash the router with updated bits, and that might help. Also note: my laptop did just fine (i.e., "just worked") via wifi all the way from beta 2, tho I recall having some issues connecting to a WPE2-encrypted station. I don't know if it was a software issue or a user issue, tho.
Out of curiousity, were you able to connect without encryption? If you're using encryption, what kind? What errors are you seeing? Are you getting an IP addy? Those would be useful things to supply when asking for networking help....tho really, asking for help on a microsoft beta (about which not a lot is known, except that it comes from MS and they're the devil as far as slashdotters can tell) from a bunch of slashdot-types (who, if they're anything like me, hate not knowing a useful answer) without supplying a lot of background info is an almost-certain recipe for abuse.:-) My advice: try flashing the router with the latest bits, then if that doesn't work, go get a supported OS.
Great. Patent a potential cure for cancer so it benefits no one but them.
Patenting the work won't un-do the health benefits of the work, it'll just give the patent owner the right to control who can profit by it. So what if they're the only ones who get paid if it saves a single life? The point, to me, is that lives might be saved and for that, I'm very OK with them showing a handsome profit. Yes, a cure for cancer would be valuable- perhaps the single most valuable medical breakthrough of our generation....and that's the point of a patent: to incentivize the sort of research that will make, for example, treatments that didn't exist yesterday at any price available.
The point is that the research might cure cancer. If you're more concerned about those darned profit-seeking corporations making a profit, perhaps your attention is misplaced- your eye seems to be more on the money than on the cure for cancer....and considering that your main complaint in this post is how those greedy corporations are only interested in making money, that seems ironic.
Part of the problem is the consumer thinks "I've spent X$ on software. If I move to platform B I would have wasted X$
Probably customers only think about switching when there's a clearly better alternative. The parent poster's point was that the best processor for the money, for a long time now, has been x86. You don't worry about sunk costs unless you're considering switching.:-)
Indidentally, 64-bit windows supports 32-bit apps under emulation; with only a few exceptions most of your 32-bit apps will migrate happily to x64 without knowing the difference. I imagine all 64-bit OSes have a similar emulation story. Since AMD64 is probably the architecture that will eclipse x86 for the desktop in terms of power/perf/price, (I don't really see others overtaking it in the PC space) the 'app sunk costs' concern may turn out to be a non-issue.
Giving the Ethiopian government trademarks on ethiopian regions so that they (the ethiopian government) can manage the branding of the beans that come from those regions wouldn't accomplish what the oxfam people want- it might enrich the ethiopian government, but would do little to benefit the co-op growers. What Starbucks wants (that is, regional certification of beans, rather than granting the ethiopian government a monopoly on the use of the names) would accomplish the same branding result- the ability for regional growers to market beans from that region at a premium. The reason the Ethiopian government doesn't like that is that it wouldn't own the brand names.
The Ethiopian government already owns too much of the coffee business. According to the CIA fact book, [http://geography.about.com/library/cia/blcethiopi a.htm] "Under Ethiopia's land tenure system, the government owns all land and provides long-term leases to the tenants; the system continues to hamper growth in the industrial sector as entrepreneurs are unable to use land as collateral for loans".
Oxfam seems to have cast Starbucks as the big, bad, mean corporation exploiting poor agricultural workers in a third world country and denying those poor Ethiopians the right to their own region names. Another equally valid view is that Starbucks sees the co-op growers and their government as being distinct, and wants to benefit the growers rather than giving more of their business away to their landlords.
Certainly there's something in it for Starbucks- they don't want to pay a royalty to what is essentially a 3rd party for the ability to sell ethiopian coffee as ethiopian coffee. The ethiopian government doesn't want regional certification of beans because it wants a direct royalty on the use of the region names- it seems not to care whether the value of the name will fetch higher market prices if they're not the ones being paid.
Also, it's easy for oxfam to throw out the fact that coffee growers make $.03/cup of coffee, and then leave it to the average person to figure that they're getting screwed- after all, a cup of coffee at Starbucks costs 2 bucks, shouldn't the grower get more? It may help to know that Starbucks probably makes about $.11/cup from their coffee. (or at least, 10 years ago when I worked for a smaller coffee company that Starbucks bought, that's what a cup's worth of beans cost wholesale. In other words, in terms of wholesale beans, about 27% of that cost makes it to the grower. It might be a little galling to realize that for the $2 you paid for that cuppa joe, $1.89 of it is for everything but the beans- starbucks is in the milk, service, and franchising business, people.)
You can create a local store and keep them on your hard drive if you must. You can auto-archive items more than n days old. That way they remain searchable, you can retain many gigs of your stuff, before you too realize that most of that stuff should be thrown out and you'll never use it.
The point is that keeping lots of stuff on yer server makes your IT people crazy. There's alternatives, but mostly they seem (as far as my experience goes) to be a waste of time. I mean, I have a couple gigs of storage on my server, and all that means is that when I finally get the email notification (your account is nearly out of space, jackass) I have a ton of stuff to filter through to decide if I need to retain.
Mental illness? Disability? Inadequate educational opportunities?
It's really easy to criticize and throw down the "lazy" card when you've never had to deal with any of these problems
This strikes me as not being entirely fair criticism. You seem to dismiss his point as being unfairly critical of the poor, when he's really criticizing the thinking behind a common 'solution' to poverty: that of taking money from the wealthy, and giving it to the poor. He's got a point- lack of money is not a cause of poverty, it is a symptom of it- and you don't solve a problem by treating just its symptoms, you solve a problem by dealing with its cause. Giving money to poor people won't change the underlying reason they're poor, it will enable them to avoid addressing it. The bottom line I took away from his post was that if we are really to serve the poor, it would make sense get to the bottom of why they're poor and help them change, instead of paying them to stay that way (incidentally, trapping them in a cycle of dependency).
He said:
the biggest obstacle standing in their way is often their own lack of motivation and mistaken belief in their own inadequacy.
Even though his tone was brusque, there's something to be said for this, and saying it does not impugn the folks who aren't motivating themselves or who mistakenly believe they are inadequate. To the contrary, I think it frames a constructive, actionable problem statement- if we want to help the folks who are poor, we should help them deal with why they're not working, and work with them to impact those areas. After all, there's no dishonor in being stuck, frustrated, unemployed, or unempowered. We've all been there at one point or another in our lives and we all know how tough it is.
To be certain, the issues you cite (mental illness, disability, inadequate opportunities/education) are totally valid and addressing them is important, (and your defending them is commendable, despite that he wasn't attacking them) but that doesn't invalidate his point- you've just pointed some valid exceptions to it. His point is that the system is not set up to enrich the rich and beggar the poor, and he's right. The system rewards productivity and statistics demonstrate that we live in the most economically mobile period and place in history.
There's no sense in blaming the poor for being poor, nor is there any sense in defending them from those who would. There is, however, a great deal of sense in having people examine the extent to which they are responsible for how their lives do or don't work the way they'd like. It might be comforting to deny the role you play in how much money you make, but when you declare someone else to be responsible for how that's going, what you're declaring to yourself is that you yourself don't have a say in the matter. In this sense, comfort and empowerment appear to be at odds. I'd much rather be the jerk who empowers you than the nice guy who doesn't, and my gut feel is that when we blame 'the system' what we're mostly doing is going for the comfort.
...whether the producer of the app is willing to certify that these are the bits they shipped
So how do you certify those are the bits you shipped when you're shipping source code?
Good point- not with a certificate. Sorry, I tend to think in terms of binaries as deliverables. My customers also get my source, but we also provide build infrastructure that includes signing, so that when they build they don't have to do anything and their binaries are signed. It probably helps that my customers are by and large entirely in-house.
It isn't a matter of well designed apps. Its a matter of the fact that windows so entwines everything into the kernel, that apps have to run as an admin to be able to do anything useful.
No, it's a matter of well-designed apps as well. I've got dozens of quite useful apps on my vista box, none of which require elevation for anything but their install or uninstall. This includes my antivirus, development tools, source control enlistments, media editing software, the works.
Running as a limited user used to be very painful on Win2k and NT4 and even on XP- but on vista it's quite painless with well-designed apps....and while it may be tempting to blame Windows for being how it is, that doesn't make an app that requires unnecessary elevated privileges anything but badly designed.
Why can't windows just follow suit?
The simple answer is that they'd probably love to, but they have customers who want to run their existing apps, and the customer is always right....the impact of this is that they *are* following suit, but are doing so the slow way- by working with app vendors to fix their apps, by blocking some apps from running altogether, and by shimming others.
um... you don't pay MS to get a certificate of trust. You get one of those from any of your friendly trust authorities. Microsoft isn't even in the business of issuing them.
Seriously, UAC (that elevation of privilege prompt) is one point where they got it right finally. This has nothing to do with whether a product is open source or not- it has everything to do with whether the app is well-designed enough to do what it needs to do with minimal need for elevated privilege, and whether the producer of the app is willing to certify that these are the bits they shipped, and back it with a certificate.
Which would be more efficient: generating from wind and losing some on the line, generating from wind offshore and losing some in the process of cracking ethanol, or generating from solar cells and losing some due to PV cell efficiency issues? Each presents trade-offs in terms of energy efficiency, but remember that energy efficiency isn't the bottom line here- after all, power isn't what's scarce. I know, we've inherited the thinking that there's an "energy shortage", but energy isn't in short supply and never has been. What there's a shortage of is a means to capture, store, and deliver in usable form the energy that's abundant all around us.
Even if 60% of the power were lost just in transmitting the power to shore, it wouldn't matter if the power that did make it to shore could be sold at a net profit. The important concern should not be energy efficiency, but rather cost efficiency- how many kw/h can be delivered per dollar of capital investment? (yeah, that's probably what you meant, but I just wanted to rant a little.):-) We should also recognize the value of diverse sourcing- in other words, instead of worrying about which is better between on-the-roof solar versus offshore wind, we should do both- the wind blows in the dark, after all, and the sun shines on calm days.
Also, if cracking to produce ethanol is on the table, shouldn't we also consider electrolytic h2 production as a means to store surplus? It might be more difficult to store h2, but environmentally it could be safer. Any idea on the relative efficiency of cracking ethanol vs electrolyzing hydrogen?
Personally, in these cases, I don't think that "Shill!" is an indicator of narrow-mindedness. It may not be an appropriate designation, but it most typically (in my experience) is a reaction to a poor argument rather than to an opposing argument
Generally you call someone a 'shill' in an effort to discredit or invalidate the source of an argument. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the argument or its quality- it is the source of the argument that is questioned here. Rhetorically, this can be categorized under the heading 'ad hominem'.
Heck, it's hard to argue against buying solar panels now. If they pay for themselves in 5 years, as has been suggested upthread, and they have a functional lifespan of > 25 years, you could buy >25 years' worth of electricity for the price of 5 years' electricity. The only 'risks', really are: a) what if the price of electricity goes down? and b) what if the price of solar panels (cost:watt) goes down?
If solar panels paid for themselves in 6 months, I'd cover my whole roof with them, sell my cars and buy cars that can run on electricity, convert my gas furnace and hot water heater to run on electricity... and I'd give my oil, coal, and gas-burning brethren unending hell until they did the same. If solar panels were cheap enough to pay for themselves in 6 months, it would make sense for everybody to do it- not only for environmental reasons, but also for economical ones.
compared to what's already on your roof (probably an asphalt tile, which converts 0% of that energy to electricity) they're... well, infinitely more efficient.
You are still relying on a seemingly purely rhetorical argument that putting money into the society which produces wealth is somehow negative for that society
Where did I say anything of the sort? I've been arguing against punitive taxes.
that was the case this country would have been decimated in the 50s and 60s when in fact it was at its strongest.
explain, please. we've gotten down to the point where the context is missing and I don't really have a clue what you mean by 'that' any more.
You can say that correlation does not prove causation all you want, but neither does it disprove it, and sometimes in a court its enough to go beyond a reasonable doubt.
...and you're using it to try to justify taking money away from people. to justify that, I'd think you would want a very solid chain of evidence- something more robust than temporal correlation.
Still to this day about half of the rich got that way because of pure genetic chance and its really hard to argue that they in some way deserve that status or have any functional purpose in keeping that wealth.
Although this view is common, it is inaccurate. The data indicate the opposite: over 80% of millionaires today are first-generation wealthy. In their book The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley, PhD and William D. Danko, PhD compiled extensive data about millionaires, their parents, and their children. In it they note a surprising phenomenon: adult children who receive financial support from their parents tend to under-perform their peers financially. In other words, the trend is toward social mobility already, and even among those who pass some wealth along to their children, most don't pass on their ability to accumulate wealth.
Second, does it matter if, in your opinion, "they deserve" anything? Should it?
If we take some of that wealth and invest it in our society, cure the health crises, build some infrastructure, cure poverty, we will truly raise all ships.
Investment in society and curing health crises and building infrastructure is not bad at all- it's a worthy goal. It does not, however, call for punitive taxation. That you think of the wealthy as robber barons doesn't make it defensible for the state to become a bigger one on your behalf.
All rhetoric aside, I'm pulling for a set of policies that begin with a win:win outcome in mind. The real problem I have when people start talking about 'the common good, but at someone else's expense' is that it's the same damned thinking that got the robber barons on top. Arguing for the state to take their role, hoping that it will be benevolent and efficient... well, to be honest, I have less faith in the state than you do in the wealthy.
1) Our concepts of property and ownership are not the root cause of class war and strife- envy is. Property rights and ownership incentivize productivity and care, where their lack encourage irresponsible exploitation. True, some will outproduce others. This is fine, up until the envious decide that they're somehow entitled to benefit from productivity they have no claim upon.
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty."
2) You might think you know all about the rich because you've seen their spoiled children and assumed that this is the story for all wealth, but it's not supported by the data. Over 80% of millionaires in the US, according to Stanley and Danko (who wrote The Millionaire Next Door), are first-generation wealthy. Interestingly, in their book they document a surprising inverse relationship between the amount of 'financial outpatient care' (what you call nepotism) an adult child receives from his/her parents and that adult child's financial lifetime productivity, freedom, and quality of life (compared to his/her peers). In other words, kids who inherit wealth or favors, who never 'make it' on their own, are less likely than their peers to become wealthy, more likely to describe their lives as fearful, and less likely to report that they are generally happy.
I recommend the book- it's written by two former Gallup pollsters, is driven by a pile of data. I was surprised by the content, you will be too.
Compare the top rate with the wealth gap and I think you'll see an inverse correlation.
That's well and good, but correlation is not causation. You're trying to infer causation from correlation, and fall prey to Post Hoc Fallacy.
...and you're doing it all over the place:
In the 50's and 60's, when everyone says the middle class was at it's best place, the rich were taxed around 90% Today its around 35% plus loophole city.
In the 50s and 60s we also enforced Jim Crow laws, watched a President and a Civil Rights leader get assassinated, and put a man on the moon. These are all temporally correlated, but none of them caused the middle class to boom, either. It doesn't follow that we should do what we did then when there's no causal relationship between them.
You've also misunderstood my analogy.
Money doesn't make us equal or unequal; it merely reflects that we are or are not equally productive. Therefore, giving or taking money cannot affect our equality- to do so merely distorts our incentive to produce. Money is a reflection of the underlying value of one's output.
If we want to foster equality, we have to deal with why we're not equally productive.
To attempt to solve the problem of inequality using taxes is that it has only one mode: subtractive. It is, first of all, a zero-sum, if not a negative-sum proposition. You might make everybody equal, but they'll be equally poor, and the standard of living for everybody will be reduced: If being a brain surgeon paid the same as flipping burgers, few people would go to the trouble of being trained to do brain surgery- meaning nobody would have access to brain surgery.
This is maddeningly simple: people with high income are where they are because they generally produce more and thus receive greater rewards. What might appear as a "disproportionate reward" is really an appropriate reward for disproportionate productivity. If we are to be equal, we want to narrow the gap of productivity by developing our low producers, not by penalizing the high ones. The latter policy reduces everybody's standard of living, while the former raises it.
"Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor always--always--depends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the game's best players lose." -- David Schmidtz
That means they're stealing from us all. Everything they discover is deliberately foreclosed from the rest of us.
It's hardly theft when you never had it in the first place.
Everything they discover was unavailable to you in the first place- otherwise it wouldn't be a discovery, it would be a use of your prior art.
Patents don't foreclose in perpetuity the benefits of an invention- they merely grant a limited monopoly on the right to sell or dispose of the work. They incentivize invention, even though they may discourage (at the patent holder's discretion) others from producing derivative work.
Personally, I'd rather be free to do my own research.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your theory is that over 80% of millionaires in this country are first-generation wealthy, and more often than not, their children do not inherit their ability to generate wealth along with whatever wealth they inherit. We live in a society that is unprecedented in the social mobility it affords its members. At no time in history has there been better financial and social mobility than we have now.
Actually, the constitution enumerates only limited powers to the government; it derives its authority from the consent of the governed, not the other way around. The basis of rights is not that they are caused by government, but that they are inherent in the people themselves. Perhaps you intended to suggest that it's reasonable to charge a use fee for services that wouldn't happen without government, but it came out backwards.
The concentration of wealth is not a problem that harms anybody, it's a non-problem that already solves itself- new wealth is constantly eclipsing the old, and sustained intergenerational wealth transfer is exceedingly rare.
Moreover, trying to 'solve' it politically is expensive and actually harmful. Whenever someone decides that it would be a great idea to use the government to take wealth away from its owners and give it to everyone else, the wealthy will quite reasonably beat them at that game like a pinata- they didn't become wealthy by losing games that involve money, after all. The resulting class warfare is expensive, divisive, and no fun. We have a tax system, for example, that is overly expensive (would you believe it costs us an estimated third of the revenue it generates, just to comply with it?) and unfair for everybody, just because we tried targeting the rich and they're better at buying congressmen (who write tax code) than the rest of us.
This is the danger we face when we try to expand the power of the government to accomplish our social missions: we become subject ourselves to this expanded power. Bringing the government into this game is like bringing a bat to a fight you're having with a better fighter than you: he'll just take the bat away from you and beat you senseless with it, at which point you'll either learn that class warfare is stupid and harmful to wage (because the rich will always win) or you'll go look for another bat to get beaten with.
Going after assets would just cause capital flight and further ensure that any taxing authority that tried it would quickly sink to bankruptcy.
For this reason, I see it as problematic to have the state be anything but the registrar of civil matrimony. The folks who don't separate holy matrimony (the church rite) from civil matrimony (the legal stuff) seem keen on using the state to enforce the view of their church over that of other churches. In my view, that's the problem with this whole debate- it isn't whether gay people should or shouldn't marry, or that the strange cat lady can't marry all 43 of her cats, it's whether this should be a political question in the first place.
Very good insight, and a strong argument against expanding the role, scope, and power of government in this way- because to do so will simply incentivize the abuse of that power without providing a check against it.
The proposal to make the government into the 'fairness police' just moves the power to say what's fair away from the media (which is somewhat distributed) to a more central location- government- where it may be abused by even fewer people. Given that one of the major services the press provides us (in theory, anyways) is to report stuff the current government doesn't particularly want to hear, it strikes me as a VERY bad idea to make the government the arbiter of fair press.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- George Orwell
Actually, pretty much all apps require admin privilege to install. Doesn't matter if it's a game or a spreadsheet or what- if it's executable content, you should get a prompt for privilege if you try to install it. (note that this is not the case for active browser content- flash games, for example, don't need any privilege).
This is only the case if you've actually got the necessary privilege. If your logon account is a member of the Administrators group, you have the privilege already- you're being explicitly asked to approve it and it would be stupid for you to have to supply your creds- after all, you're already logged in as you, you're just running with a limited token (which is a good idea) that you're asked to assert from time to time.
Such is not the case if you're running as a member of the users group- in that case, you must supply creds of an account with said privilege.
I'm rooting for metric, but for one part: ...am I the only one who thinks "liters per 100km" is an annoying way of expressing fuel efficiency? Why can't we measure Kilometers per Liter, as we have with Miles per Gallon? /peeve
yaaay metric system! booooo hogsheads per furlong!
I paid for college by working on fishing boats that worked the Bering Sea. Now THAT was dirty work- during cod season, my job was to bleed them out before they died of asphyxiation- this prevents blood from pooling in the meat, makes fillets pretty and white. If you've ever slaughtered anything for a living, you know what it is to be covered in blood spray. Mercifully, fish don't scream.
When we were in the fish, we'd work insane hours- 20 on, 4 off, repeat. After a while, people would lose their will to live, and injury rates would go up. Commercial fishing ranked just behind crabbing and high-rise firefighting for dangerous jobs. I have, it would appear, an exceptionally strong will to live, but a weak stomach- for 12 hours at the beginning of every storm we hit (some of which were plain incredible) I would throw up every 20 minutes. I promise, I didn't do it in your fishsticks.
No bad smell I've ever encountered compares to the smell of those boats on the way back to port- by the end of the trip, the fish that fell to the deck and didn't wash overboard had been covered by the fish that fell after, and the bottom fish were liquefied goo. Fire hoses would start the job, followed by scrub pads, brushes, and chlorine-based sanitizers. There was no way to not smell like rotten fish- and after a while, you couldn't bring yourself to care. I burned my boat clothes after my last contract, which finished paying off my undergrad loans, bought me a car, and took a small chunk out of my grad school loans.
I'm glad to have the experience I have; being at sea all that time was, in hindsight, strangely wonderful- I've always loved the sea. The downsides were that most of your peers were either burn-outs from the service sector, took a contract because they blew their last pile of money up their nose, or were one step ahead of their parole officers- and management treated us all accordingly- like malfunctioning teenagers.
I now work for one of the companies on the top 100 list, don't have to kill anything but runaway processes, don't have to risk life and limb, get to use my brain for a living, but still spend a lot of time looking at the ocean.
If you're a smart user, you won't disable UAC. You'll recognize that there's value in having control over what runs on your computer.
I don't know that their approach really sucks as bad as you say; it recognizes that there's a lot of decisions that should be left up to the user, and the decision-making on whether to approve a privilege elevation isn't that complicated: do I know what that is? no? then no, I won't approve it. If you're installing an app, say 'yes'. If you're surfing porn, say 'no'. If you have questions at all about anything, say 'no'. There, you're an expert.
If you turn off UAC, you're essentially saying 'yes' to everything- at which point, you might really have a good reason to swear. Without UAC, it's more painful to run as a limited user, and running as a limited user gives you many security benefits- like, for example, not giving your mail client or browser or apps the sort of privilege worth exploiting.
I was able to use my laptop last week, running Vista (RTM), just fine via wifi and wired modes on a more recent version of that same wireless router.
...tho really, asking for help on a microsoft beta (about which not a lot is known, except that it comes from MS and they're the devil as far as slashdotters can tell) from a bunch of slashdot-types (who, if they're anything like me, hate not knowing a useful answer) without supplying a lot of background info is an almost-certain recipe for abuse. :-) My advice: try flashing the router with the latest bits, then if that doesn't work, go get a supported OS.
You may be able to flash the router with updated bits, and that might help. Also note: my laptop did just fine (i.e., "just worked") via wifi all the way from beta 2, tho I recall having some issues connecting to a WPE2-encrypted station. I don't know if it was a software issue or a user issue, tho.
Out of curiousity, were you able to connect without encryption? If you're using encryption, what kind? What errors are you seeing? Are you getting an IP addy? Those would be useful things to supply when asking for networking help.
The point is that the research might cure cancer. If you're more concerned about those darned profit-seeking corporations making a profit, perhaps your attention is misplaced- your eye seems to be more on the money than on the cure for cancer.
Indidentally, 64-bit windows supports 32-bit apps under emulation; with only a few exceptions most of your 32-bit apps will migrate happily to x64 without knowing the difference. I imagine all 64-bit OSes have a similar emulation story. Since AMD64 is probably the architecture that will eclipse x86 for the desktop in terms of power/perf/price, (I don't really see others overtaking it in the PC space) the 'app sunk costs' concern may turn out to be a non-issue.
Giving the Ethiopian government trademarks on ethiopian regions so that they (the ethiopian government) can manage the branding of the beans that come from those regions wouldn't accomplish what the oxfam people want- it might enrich the ethiopian government, but would do little to benefit the co-op growers. What Starbucks wants (that is, regional certification of beans, rather than granting the ethiopian government a monopoly on the use of the names) would accomplish the same branding result- the ability for regional growers to market beans from that region at a premium. The reason the Ethiopian government doesn't like that is that it wouldn't own the brand names.i a.htm] "Under Ethiopia's land tenure system, the government owns all land and provides long-term leases to the tenants; the system continues to hamper growth in the industrial sector as entrepreneurs are unable to use land as collateral for loans".
The Ethiopian government already owns too much of the coffee business. According to the CIA fact book, [http://geography.about.com/library/cia/blcethiop
Oxfam seems to have cast Starbucks as the big, bad, mean corporation exploiting poor agricultural workers in a third world country and denying those poor Ethiopians the right to their own region names. Another equally valid view is that Starbucks sees the co-op growers and their government as being distinct, and wants to benefit the growers rather than giving more of their business away to their landlords. Certainly there's something in it for Starbucks- they don't want to pay a royalty to what is essentially a 3rd party for the ability to sell ethiopian coffee as ethiopian coffee. The ethiopian government doesn't want regional certification of beans because it wants a direct royalty on the use of the region names- it seems not to care whether the value of the name will fetch higher market prices if they're not the ones being paid.
Also, it's easy for oxfam to throw out the fact that coffee growers make $.03/cup of coffee, and then leave it to the average person to figure that they're getting screwed- after all, a cup of coffee at Starbucks costs 2 bucks, shouldn't the grower get more? It may help to know that Starbucks probably makes about $.11/cup from their coffee. (or at least, 10 years ago when I worked for a smaller coffee company that Starbucks bought, that's what a cup's worth of beans cost wholesale. In other words, in terms of wholesale beans, about 27% of that cost makes it to the grower. It might be a little galling to realize that for the $2 you paid for that cuppa joe, $1.89 of it is for everything but the beans- starbucks is in the milk, service, and franchising business, people.)
You can create a local store and keep them on your hard drive if you must. You can auto-archive items more than n days old. That way they remain searchable, you can retain many gigs of your stuff, before you too realize that most of that stuff should be thrown out and you'll never use it.
The point is that keeping lots of stuff on yer server makes your IT people crazy. There's alternatives, but mostly they seem (as far as my experience goes) to be a waste of time. I mean, I have a couple gigs of storage on my server, and all that means is that when I finally get the email notification (your account is nearly out of space, jackass) I have a ton of stuff to filter through to decide if I need to retain.
He said: Even though his tone was brusque, there's something to be said for this, and saying it does not impugn the folks who aren't motivating themselves or who mistakenly believe they are inadequate. To the contrary, I think it frames a constructive, actionable problem statement- if we want to help the folks who are poor, we should help them deal with why they're not working, and work with them to impact those areas. After all, there's no dishonor in being stuck, frustrated, unemployed, or unempowered. We've all been there at one point or another in our lives and we all know how tough it is.
To be certain, the issues you cite (mental illness, disability, inadequate opportunities/education) are totally valid and addressing them is important, (and your defending them is commendable, despite that he wasn't attacking them) but that doesn't invalidate his point- you've just pointed some valid exceptions to it. His point is that the system is not set up to enrich the rich and beggar the poor, and he's right. The system rewards productivity and statistics demonstrate that we live in the most economically mobile period and place in history.
There's no sense in blaming the poor for being poor, nor is there any sense in defending them from those who would. There is, however, a great deal of sense in having people examine the extent to which they are responsible for how their lives do or don't work the way they'd like. It might be comforting to deny the role you play in how much money you make, but when you declare someone else to be responsible for how that's going, what you're declaring to yourself is that you yourself don't have a say in the matter. In this sense, comfort and empowerment appear to be at odds. I'd much rather be the jerk who empowers you than the nice guy who doesn't, and my gut feel is that when we blame 'the system' what we're mostly doing is going for the comfort.
Running as a limited user used to be very painful on Win2k and NT4 and even on XP- but on vista it's quite painless with well-designed apps.
The simple answer is that they'd probably love to, but they have customers who want to run their existing apps, and the customer is always right.
um... you don't pay MS to get a certificate of trust. You get one of those from any of your friendly trust authorities. Microsoft isn't even in the business of issuing them.
Seriously, UAC (that elevation of privilege prompt) is one point where they got it right finally. This has nothing to do with whether a product is open source or not- it has everything to do with whether the app is well-designed enough to do what it needs to do with minimal need for elevated privilege, and whether the producer of the app is willing to certify that these are the bits they shipped, and back it with a certificate.
Which would be more efficient: generating from wind and losing some on the line, generating from wind offshore and losing some in the process of cracking ethanol, or generating from solar cells and losing some due to PV cell efficiency issues? Each presents trade-offs in terms of energy efficiency, but remember that energy efficiency isn't the bottom line here- after all, power isn't what's scarce. I know, we've inherited the thinking that there's an "energy shortage", but energy isn't in short supply and never has been. What there's a shortage of is a means to capture, store, and deliver in usable form the energy that's abundant all around us.
:-) We should also recognize the value of diverse sourcing- in other words, instead of worrying about which is better between on-the-roof solar versus offshore wind, we should do both- the wind blows in the dark, after all, and the sun shines on calm days.
Even if 60% of the power were lost just in transmitting the power to shore, it wouldn't matter if the power that did make it to shore could be sold at a net profit. The important concern should not be energy efficiency, but rather cost efficiency- how many kw/h can be delivered per dollar of capital investment? (yeah, that's probably what you meant, but I just wanted to rant a little.)
Also, if cracking to produce ethanol is on the table, shouldn't we also consider electrolytic h2 production as a means to store surplus? It might be more difficult to store h2, but environmentally it could be safer. Any idea on the relative efficiency of cracking ethanol vs electrolyzing hydrogen?
Heck, it's hard to argue against buying solar panels now. If they pay for themselves in 5 years, as has been suggested upthread, and they have a functional lifespan of > 25 years, you could buy >25 years' worth of electricity for the price of 5 years' electricity. The only 'risks', really are: a) what if the price of electricity goes down? and b) what if the price of solar panels (cost:watt) goes down?
If solar panels paid for themselves in 6 months, I'd cover my whole roof with them, sell my cars and buy cars that can run on electricity, convert my gas furnace and hot water heater to run on electricity... and I'd give my oil, coal, and gas-burning brethren unending hell until they did the same. If solar panels were cheap enough to pay for themselves in 6 months, it would make sense for everybody to do it- not only for environmental reasons, but also for economical ones.
explain, please. we've gotten down to the point where the context is missing and I don't really have a clue what you mean by 'that' any more.
Although this view is common, it is inaccurate. The data indicate the opposite: over 80% of millionaires today are first-generation wealthy. In their book The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley, PhD and William D. Danko, PhD compiled extensive data about millionaires, their parents, and their children. In it they note a surprising phenomenon: adult children who receive financial support from their parents tend to under-perform their peers financially. In other words, the trend is toward social mobility already, and even among those who pass some wealth along to their children, most don't pass on their ability to accumulate wealth.
Second, does it matter if, in your opinion, "they deserve" anything? Should it?
Investment in society and curing health crises and building infrastructure is not bad at all- it's a worthy goal. It does not, however, call for punitive taxation. That you think of the wealthy as robber barons doesn't make it defensible for the state to become a bigger one on your behalf.
All rhetoric aside, I'm pulling for a set of policies that begin with a win:win outcome in mind. The real problem I have when people start talking about 'the common good, but at someone else's expense' is that it's the same damned thinking that got the robber barons on top. Arguing for the state to take their role, hoping that it will be benevolent and efficient... well, to be honest, I have less faith in the state than you do in the wealthy.
1) Our concepts of property and ownership are not the root cause of class war and strife- envy is. Property rights and ownership incentivize productivity and care, where their lack encourage irresponsible exploitation. True, some will outproduce others. This is fine, up until the envious decide that they're somehow entitled to benefit from productivity they have no claim upon. 2) You might think you know all about the rich because you've seen their spoiled children and assumed that this is the story for all wealth, but it's not supported by the data. Over 80% of millionaires in the US, according to Stanley and Danko (who wrote The Millionaire Next Door), are first-generation wealthy. Interestingly, in their book they document a surprising inverse relationship between the amount of 'financial outpatient care' (what you call nepotism) an adult child receives from his/her parents and that adult child's financial lifetime productivity, freedom, and quality of life (compared to his/her peers). In other words, kids who inherit wealth or favors, who never 'make it' on their own, are less likely than their peers to become wealthy, more likely to describe their lives as fearful, and less likely to report that they are generally happy.
I recommend the book- it's written by two former Gallup pollsters, is driven by a pile of data. I was surprised by the content, you will be too.
You've also misunderstood my analogy.
Money doesn't make us equal or unequal; it merely reflects that we are or are not equally productive. Therefore, giving or taking money cannot affect our equality- to do so merely distorts our incentive to produce. Money is a reflection of the underlying value of one's output.
If we want to foster equality, we have to deal with why we're not equally productive.
To attempt to solve the problem of inequality using taxes is that it has only one mode: subtractive. It is, first of all, a zero-sum, if not a negative-sum proposition. You might make everybody equal, but they'll be equally poor, and the standard of living for everybody will be reduced: If being a brain surgeon paid the same as flipping burgers, few people would go to the trouble of being trained to do brain surgery- meaning nobody would have access to brain surgery.
This is maddeningly simple: people with high income are where they are because they generally produce more and thus receive greater rewards. What might appear as a "disproportionate reward" is really an appropriate reward for disproportionate productivity. If we are to be equal, we want to narrow the gap of productivity by developing our low producers, not by penalizing the high ones. The latter policy reduces everybody's standard of living, while the former raises it.
"Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor always--always--depends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the game's best players lose." -- David Schmidtz
Everything they discover was unavailable to you in the first place- otherwise it wouldn't be a discovery, it would be a use of your prior art. Patents don't foreclose in perpetuity the benefits of an invention- they merely grant a limited monopoly on the right to sell or dispose of the work. They incentivize invention, even though they may discourage (at the patent holder's discretion) others from producing derivative work.
You are.